As Andrew Sullivan prepares to stop blogging, a decision he announced in a note to his readers, many are trying to parse what this moment means for opinion journalism.

Is it the end of the blogging era?

Could The Dish survive without its headliner, like The Tonight Show after Johnny Carson? Or does this conclude an experiment in commentary and curation paid for by a community of readers rather than a collection of advertisers?

As for Sullivan, could stepping away from the news cycle afford him the sort of perspective that allowed, say, David Simon to create The Wire after leaving newspapers? Will he find that, despite his best intentions, he just can't quit blogging? Scores of different questions could as easily be pegged to this announcement.

For answers, I looked back.

* * *

In 2000, the year when Andrew Sullivan began blogging, AOL and Time Warner announced their ill-fated merger, The Tribune Company paid $8 billion for The Los Angeles Times and a collection of other media properties, and Internet penetration in the United States hadn't quite reached 60 percent of the population. Google AdWords launched that year. Facebook wouldn't exist for four more years.

That fall, Rebecca Blood published "weblogs, a history and perspective," tracing the format to 1997 and aptly describing it for the uninitiated. "Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor's commentary," she wrote. "An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked."

She continued:

These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them... By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites... and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand.

That description of the format at its best holds up surprisingly well.

That year, The Daily Dish, as it was then called, consisted of a navy blue background with white type, and unfolded at a much slower pace than later iterations. Like much of the broadly political blogosphere, it gained both energy and a larger community of readers in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. And right from the start, Sullivan distinguished himself from many other bloggers by linking not only fellow travelers in whatever cause he was pushing in a given post, but also people who were vehemently disagreeing with or even cursing at him. (As a blogger who emailed Sullivan hoping he'd link me, I soon realized that he wouldn't stop sending traffic no matter how forcefully one criticized his ideas, a quality that I've always respected as much as anything he has achieved.)

In what seemed like big traffic numbers at the time, Sullivan counted 200,000 readers during a single month in 2002. When TheNew York Times published "At Large in the Blogosphere" that spring, it posited that "bloggers like to disagree, but they are unanimous about blogging's advantages over traditional journalism: greater looseness of spirit; openness to more points of view; a more conversational tone; and a compulsive honesty that has bloggers linking to articles in which they found their ideas." It also quoted detractors of the medium.

Sullivan's blog "sets a standard for narcissistic egocentricity that makes Henry Kissinger look like St. Francis of Assisi,'' progressive Eric Alterman, then at The Nation, declared. The criticism would be unthinkable today. Narcissism is relative, and we've grown accustomed to a world of daily "status updates," Tweets that alert thousands of followers to fleeting observations, and Instagram posts that display for far-flung acquaintances our favorite meals, pets, and offspring. If blogging is defined as it once was—personalized, conversational in tone, loose in spirit, open to broader range of views than mass media—then the era of blogging isn't over so much as almost entirely assimilated into mainstream media.

If blogging is "highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user," every curatorial-minded Facebook and Twitter user is a micro-blogger.

As a 15-year reader of his blogging, I will miss the daily commentary and its powerful strengths, even as I look forward to future essays and books.

And if blogging is a single individual filtering the world through their perspective in posts of reverse-chronological order? Well, that approach will continue to exist, too, but Sullivan shifted away from it long ago. To conflate the blog that he started in 2000 and the site that he runs today is to miss a significant evolution. "There comes a time," Sullivan wrote this week, "when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize, before you crash, that burn-out does happen." This isn't a new insight. Sullivan understood from almost the beginning that The Daily Dish was unsustainable as a one man operation. At first, that meant his insisting on a month long break every August, when the blog went dormant. But soon enough, he sought help from other writers.

He was hardly alone in turning his site over to guest bloggers during subsequent vacations, but the evolution didn't end there. Around the time he was contracting with Time magazine and then The Atlantic to host The Daily Dish, he hired Patrick Appel, his longtime deputy, to read the entire Internet, pass along fodder, and later to prep skeleton posts that Sullivan would finish off with commentary. While an intern at The Atlantic in 2007, one of my many duties included drawing on years of reading Sullivan to pass along ever more fodder. After a stint as features editor of a short-lived web magazine, I briefly joined a growing team at The Dish full time, guest-blogging when Sullivan was on vacation and searching the Web in normal weeks for anything on which he could build a good post.

This personal tie to what became The Dish inevitably shapes my reaction to this week's announcement (though my role was insignificant compared to Appel, Chris Bodenner, and other staffers who deserve tremendous credit for improving the site). As Andrew's friend, I'm glad he has decided to make his health a priority.

May he grow old in our company!

As a 15-year reader of his blogging, I will miss the daily commentary and its powerful strengths, even as I look forward to future essays and books—mediums where his several weaknesses will be mitigated by time spent reflecting, editing and refining. Writer and musician James Poulos put it this way: "Andrew's combative, omnivorous mind is built to blog, but his heart has long beaten with a melancholy that the internet seems built to crowd far out of view. Like any student of Oakeshott, he knows that even small stretches of repose can open onto big, hidden vistas. I look forward to reading Andrew, so to speak, by the fire and off the clock."

As do I.

This moment is unusual in that it feels like a goodbye, even though Sullivan is very much sticking around. (Does anyone imagine that he'll be able to resist penning The Case Against Hillary?) What's less certain is the fate of the platform he built.

As an erstwhile Dish staffer and guest-blogger, and an avid reader of its current incarnation, with its masthead of thoughtful writers and expert curators, I urge Sullivan to consider that he could perhaps quit blogging and step back from The Dish while still acting as its publisher. "While Andrew can be vociferous with his disagreement," Megan McArdle, one of many writers who has guest-blogged for The Dish, told me Wednesday, "he has always had a remarkably generous spirit about sharing the attention he got—he sought out a wide range of opinions, including those that disagreed with him, and linked to as many voices as possible. That he also opened his own platform to so many of us was even more remarkable."

With its eclectic history of guest-bloggers, one can imagine the site evolving into something like Saturday Night Live.

Perhaps The Dish could continue to render that service to rising writers and readers eager to discover them. With its eclectic history of guest-bloggers, one can imagine the site evolving into something like Saturday Night Live, with a guest host each week to put their stamp on the broadcast even as they work with a staff that keeps continuity and produces its own stars. It's hard to overstate how much such opportunities mean to young people struggling to make it in a field where getting recognized for one's voice and ideas isn't guaranteed. As a writer, I won over many a longtime reader thanks to my time at The Dish. There are a dozen writers who I follow each week that I wouldn't have discovered without it.

The community of Dish readers is another feature of the site that is worth conserving. They are a delightfully diverse group, possessed of a public-spirited willingness to share, via email, impressively informed, thoughtful perspectives on most any subject. Marijuana use as a successful adult, whether to spank children, the experience of having a late-term abortion—on those subjects and so many others, the Dish community has produced engaging collections of insight, debate, and personal narratives unlike any I've seen elsewhere. In attracting these correspondents and inspiring them to share their ideas across ideologies and identities, Sullivan mediated something that may well be impossible to recreate if it disappears.

"It’s hard to imagine The Dish continuing on without Sullivan, because the stand-alone Dish relied—for all of its independent revenue—on its readers’ loyalty to The Andrew Show," Michelle Dean, another writer who has guest-blogged on the site, opined in The Guardian. "This loyalty was not particularly elastic at the best of times. His audience was always small (only some 30,000 readers subscribed) if apparently influential." Perhaps she is correct, and my notion that the platform can continue to sustain itself without any Sullivan blogging is unrealistic.

But it is a testament to his skill as the editor of his own irreverent little digital magazine—and to the people he hired, the sensibility that he shaped, the diversity of views that he welcomed, and the liberal, enlightenment values that were his lodestar—that so many of The Dish's readers visited the site even when he was away. I needn't say anymore on the subject, because as ever, Sullivan's community of readers will weigh in with eloquence and originality in coming days. I'll read that correspondence wistfully, as if it were the last time, but I hope that it isn't.

About the Author

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.